Operation Loop-Based Network Design Model for Defense Resource Allocation With Uncertainty

In the military arms race, the focus of the defender is on selecting the optimal development plan of armaments, i.e., advantageous defense resources allocation. As an indispensable feature of armaments, the cooperative interactions between different armaments influence their effectiveness directly, but they have not been elaborated yet in the existing study. In this regard, a mathematical formulation, named operation loop, is proposed to investigate the cooperative interactions between armaments, sequentially facilitating the description of the development plans’ performance. Additionally, the defender's development plans of armaments depend much on the attacker's weapons, bringing the characteristics of multiobjective into this problem. Furthermore, the uncertainty about the development plans of the attacker has been taken into consideration as well. Therefore, the paper concentrates on formulating the resources allocation problem with incomplete information as a network design problem. By optimizing the network design using covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy, an effective armaments development plan can be obtained. The feasibility is demonstrated by a case study.